Fort Mose Archaeological Collaborative. Summer Field School, St. Augustine, Florida, July 3 to August 11, 2023. "Paid Fieldwork Opportunity for Students; Explore historic St. Augustine; Discover the first legally sanctioned free Black settlement in North America; Build your skills as a field archaeologist and public historian; No previous archaeological experience necessary; No field school fees (room and board costs covered by grant); Field assistants paid $15 hour up to 20 hours a week; College credit registration optional with various enrollment options; Funded by a National Park Service, American Battlefield Preservation Planning Grant." Application period closes April 17, 2023; Learn about Fort Mose at www.floridastateparks.org/parks-and-trails/fortmose-historic-state-park; Begin your Application online at tinyurl.com/ynv9xfm5. For more information, contact Dr. Liz lbarrola, ibarrola@utexas.edu.

Archaeological Field School at IIT and Bronzeville-Black Metropolis National Heritage Area, Chicago, Illinois. May 22 to June 9, 2023; and May 30 to June 16, 2023; parallel field schools running jointly by Lake Forest College and Morton College. "Students will experience a real archaeological exacavation as participants in Chicago! The Archaeological Field School Introduces students to the discipline of archaeology, with an emphasis on fieldwork and excavation. Students are the field crew on an archaeological dig on the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) campus, with lectures, readings, workshops, and field trips providing the theoretical and historical context for the archaeological methods." Instructors: Drs. Rebecca Graff (graff@lakeforest.edu), and Shannon Martino (shannon.martino@morton.edu), https://www.lakeforest.edu/academics/summer-classes.

Evergreen Plantation Archaeological Field School, Wallace, Louisiana. May 14 to June 17, 2023. "Evergreen Plantation Archaeological Field School (EPAFS) is a unique and interdisciplinary field school located on the most intact plantation in the Southeast United States. Situated in Edgard, Louisiana, EPAFS gives students the opportunity to learn how to interpret the material culture found at the 'trowel's edge' through supporting coursework in archaeological field methods, African American history, and the Literatures of the Afro-Gulf South. Historical records provide a limited retelling of plantation lifeways during the 18th and 19th centuries. Archaeology, on the other hand, employs the study of material culture to describe life for the enslaved Africans, free people of color, Creoles, and enslavers whose identities and histories interacted on Evergreen. Students will interpret ground penetrating radar (GPR) data and will work with faculty and graduate students in the excavation of anomalies located in the spaces surrounding the 22, original slave cabins on Evergreen. Subsurface testing and excavation will add to our rudimentary understanding of the kinds of activities that took place on Evergreen Plantation. While archaeology strives to uncover a detailed history of plantation life, students will also be introduced to music, foodways, literature, oral histories, local community organizers, field trips, and expert guests to fully understand how residents lived and worked along Louisiana's German Coast from 1800 to 1950. This multi-disciplinary approach to teaching the history and culture of this sugar-producing region will provide students with the tools necessary to interpret excavations and material culture while in the field and while excavating." Instructors: Drs. Jayur Madhusudan Mehta, Natalie King-Pedroso, and Alisha Gaines. https://ifrglobal.org/program/us-la-evergreen-plantation/.

Laurel Hill Plantation, Murrels Inlet, South Carolina, May 8 to June 2, 2023. "This May will be our second season at site 38GE201, a captive African housing area , late 1700s to 1800s. May 2022 marked the first investigations at the site since Lesley Drucker's survey in 1980. The site has been well-protected from disturbance, and so far, contexts are looking early-to-mid-19th century. In 1860 the plantation changed ownership, but the seller, Plowden Weston, did not include the Captive Africans in the sale so the new owner, Daniel Jordan, brought in different enslaved people he purchased from other plantations in the region; making the context dating critical. The field school will include guest experts who will present on ground penetrating radar and drone use, public interpretation of African American history, portable X-ray Fluorescence applications, and Gullah culture of the late 1700s through 1800s." Contact David Palmer (dpalmer1@coastal.edu). 4 credits; cost, $1,948.00 (in-state and out-of-state residents).

Archaeology of Chesapeake Landscape and Slavery, Charlottesville, Virginia. June 5 to July 15, 2023. "The Monticello-University of Virginia Field School offers a hands-on introduction to basic excavation, recording, and laboratory techniques in archaeology. The course emphasizes a scientific, multidisciplinary approach to doing landscape archaeology. It also provides the opportunity to contribute to cutting-edge research into the ecological and social dynamics that unfolded on Thomas Jefferson's Monticello Plantation in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Technical topics covered include survey and excavation strategies as well as recovery techniques and analytical possibilities for deposits and the sediments they contain, soils, faunal remains, plant phytoliths and pollen, macrobotanicals, tree rings, and spatial distributions of artifacts across sites and landscapes. The course offers students an opportunity to learn from and interact with scholars specializing in digital archaeology, archaeological data analysis, geoarchaeology, zooarchaeology, paleoethnobotany, and dendrochronology. Our fieldwork addresses changing patterns of land use and settlement on Thomas Jefferson's Monticello Plantation from c. 1750 to 1860, along with their ecological and social causes and consequences. Toward the end of the 18th century, spurred by shifts in the Atlantic economy, Thomas Jefferson and planters across the Chesapeake region replaced tobacco cultivation with a more diversified agricultural regime, based around wheat. Our research is revealing the enormous implications of this shift for what the landscape looked like and how enslaved African-Americans worked and lived on it. Significant questions remain about the ecological processes that were unleashed, how they were experienced by slaves and slave owners, and the importance of changing slave work routines in explaining social dynamics among enslaved and free people." Fraser D. Neiman, Department of Archaeology, Monticello and Departments of Anthropology and Architectural History, University of Virginia. http://www.monticello.org/fieldschool.

Montpelier Field School and Paid Internships, James Madison's Montpelier, Orange, Virginia. "The Montpelier Archaeology Department is thrilled to offer its annual field school with opportunities for students to apply for a full-time paid internship with housing and benefits. African American students will be offered a full scholarship for the field school that will cover the field school fees and housing ($700). This year we will be excavating a set of domestic sites related to the 1810s Home Farm complex occupied by enslaved Americans and an overseer. The field school runs May 22-June 30 with selections made from field school students in late June for full-time employment. Please see our website for more details on our field school, the dig season, and our internship program. We will be working with the Montpelier Descendant Committee on research design for this summer's work and will be excavating intact structural features. Excavations at the Home Farm will continue into the Fall of 2023 followed by laboratory analysis. Following the field school, we hire five students as full time staff members at Montpelier in a year-long internship that includes housing. Internships will provide successful applicants with a wide array of experience from excavation, artifact analysis, GIS experience, and the chance to present at professional conferences. Interns are provided with the skills to apply for graduate school or obtain a job in the field of archaeology following the internship." https://www.montpelier.org/archaeology/field-schools.

Smith's Island Archaeology Project Field School, Bermuda, May 21 to July 2, 2023. "Now entering its twelfth season, the Smith's Island Archaeology Field School has trained dozens of students in excavation and research methods and prepared them for graduate study and professional work. This unique program studies the early Modern Atlantic World from Bermuda -– an island at its center -– as we investigate two early 17th-century sites dating to the dawn of settlement. Students are involved in all aspects of fieldwork during our six-week season: excavation, artifact identification, documentary research, mapping, and photography. Through readings, archival research, and exploration of local sites and museums you will learn about Bermuda's rich history and processes of cultural hybridity and creolization embedded in American and African Diasporic history. Prior archaeological experience or knowledge of early American history is not required." Volunteers welcome. Dr. Michael Jarvis, University of Rochester, http://smithsislandarchaeology.blogspot.com/p/historical-archaeology-field-school-2023.html.

Providence Island, Columbia. Historical Archaeology, Ethnography & Community Oriented Outreach, June 24 to July 19, 2023. "This project seeks to understand Old Providence and Santa Catalina as a unique cultural-historical and material biome -- a community with ties to and reliance on variable international and sociopolitical market economies from the Colony's inception in 1629 to today. The Islands' social, economic, and material connections to the global world and between groups and individuals present in this discrete place forged a unique context and thus, associated behaviors, which can be observed in the documentary, oral, material, and spatial records. Therefore, by conferring with Native voices and applying archaeological and anthropological foundations, methods, and solutions, the project seeks to clarify the historical timeline of Old Providence and Santa Catalina and to elucidate localized strategies utilized by Raizal peoples to negotiate the complex relationships between and among variable stakeholders embedded within the colonial- and modern-industrial complexes." The project is also exploring possible evidence of past settlements by individuals who escaped enslavement in the region. Instructor: Dr. Tracie Mayfield. https://ifrglobal.org/program/colombia-providence-island/.

New Book

Clotilda: The History and Archaeology of the Last Slave Ship
By James P. Delgado, Deborah E. Marx, Kyle Lent, Joseph Grinnan, Alexander DeCaro, D. Lisa D. Jones, and Stacye Hathorn
University of Alabama Press, Paperback
232 pp., ISBN-13: 978-0817321512, 2023.

Description from the Publisher:

New Book

Segregation Made Them Neighbors: An Archaeology of Racialization in Boise, Idaho
By William A. White III
University of Nebraska Press
242 pp., ISBN-13: 978-1496217134, 2023.

Description from the Publisher:

New Book

African Refugees
By Toyin Falola and Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso
Indiana University Press, Cloth
634 pp., ISBN-13: 978-0253064417, 2023.

Description from the Publisher:

New Book

The Vital Dead: Making Meaning, Identity, and Community through Cemeteries
By Alison Bell
University of Tennesee Press, Cloth
288 pp., ISBN-13: 978-1621906964, 2023.

Description from the Publisher:

Tessa Murphy. The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean. Early American Studies Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. 320 pp. (Cloth). ISBN 978-0-8122-5338-2.

H-Net Book Review, published by H-Lat-Am, https://networks.h-net.org/h-latam (August, 2022).

Reviewed for H-Lat-Am by Lauren MacDonald (Idaho State University).

The history of the colonial Caribbean is often studied as a theater of imperial competition where far-off European powers clashed over sugar islands. In contrast, in The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean, Tessa Murphy argues that the southeastern corner of the Caribbean contained communities that defiantly cut across political boundaries. The book focuses on the smaller southern islands of the Lesser Antilles -- particularly Dominica, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, and Grenada -- and the British and French efforts to claim those islands in the eighteenth century. Rather than a chain of terrestrial units cleanly separated by water and politics, these Caribbean islands formed a maritime borderland that stretched across land and sea. The book traces how Indigenous, African, and European inhabitants moved through this borderland and built societies partially outside the control of abutting empires. Their world was made possible by the physical landscape: navigable water routes facilitated human mobility, interisland connections, and the evasion of imperial surveillance.

In Caribbean contexts, the term "Creole" has various overlapping meanings that can refer to language, birthplace, ancestry, dislocation, mixture, and/or creation. The Creole Archipelago chooses a capacious definition: "a hybrid community that emerged as people who were born and spent their lives in this space engaged in exchange, interaction, accommodation, and contestation" (p. 6). The book places its Creole peoples in dialectical opposition to the European colonial officials who scrabbled to exploit them. Borrowing from James C. Scott's conception of state spaces and zones of refuge, The Creole Archipelago seeks to use the archives of European empires to understand people who lived just outside those empires. The book surveys an admirable range of sources: treaties, maps, census counts, ecclesiastical records, missionary reports, land sales, traveler accounts, legal codes, meeting minutes, and administrative correspondence from archives located across Europe, North America, and the Caribbean. This sweep of sources, ranging from highly stylized imperial fantasies to quotidian commercial transactions, allows the book to offer both breadth and depth in its depiction of Caribbean society. In particular, records of island baptisms and marriages reveal the surprising physical mobility and racial fluidity of this borderland society. Throughout, the book remains sensitive to the distortions wrought by the archive itself. The author notes how census data varied in its level of detail as it removed messy complexity to create simple columns of anonymized numbers. To counteract the tendency of social history to drift toward bloodless accounts of faceless masses, each chapter opens with a humanizing anecdote focused on an individual's life story within their wider Caribbean world.

The most striking chapters of The Creole Archipelago deal directly with the Indigenous history of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Caribbean. The Kalinago peoples, who were usually called "Caribs" by colonial observers, have been minimized in histories of the Caribbean. The Creole Archipelago argues that the Indigenous history of the Lesser Antilles has been underestimated by historians because Kalinago leaders so often removed themselves from European control. In the first chapter, the book examines the language used in treaties, maps, and missionary reports to argue that seventeenth-century Kalinago leaders successfully negotiated enduring influence in ways that European officials were either unable or unwilling to perceive. In this methodological approach, the slight archival presence of the Kalinago signals their power.

In its fifth chapter, the book returns to Kalinago communities in the eighteenth century as they defended their sovereignty on St. Vincent, an island claimed by the British after 1763. In previous decades, Kalinago communities had sometimes accepted African or African-descended people fleeing enslavement into their communities. As a result, several European observers proposed that eighteenth-century Kalinago communities no longer were Indigenous but instead were defined by African ancestry. Following the scholarship of Melanie J. Newton, The Creole Archipelago argues that British colonists questioned Kalinago indigeneity as a means of questioning past treaties that guaranteed Kalinago land rights. It also allowed the British to understand Kalinago autonomy in a more comprehensible framework: maroonage. After a period of violent conflict, a 1773 treaty between the Kalinago and the British on St. Vincent echoed the terms of earlier treaties signed between British officials and Jamaican Maroon leaders. Kalinago leaders swore their support to King George III, retained a remnant of their previous territories, and promised not to harbor any future people fleeing enslavement.

In the middle chapters of the book, which cover the early and middle decades of the eighteenth century, the Kalinago recede from the narrative. Instead, the book turns to the European settlers who moved to the islands, the enslaved African people they forcibly brought with them, and the subsequent generations who built a multiethnic society in the eighteenth-century Lesser Antilles. These people often resided in places that imperial officials wished they would not. Despite frequent British and French attempts to control or evacuate illicit island settlement, residents on the smaller islands remained. While racial boundaries were more fluid in this Antillean borderland, the book does not sugarcoat the inequalities of the society that developed therein. Slavery was ubiquitous, and enslaved people labored across fields of cotton, coffee, and manioc. Ultimately, sugar is the hinge on which The Creole Archipelago turns: its relative unimportance on the smaller islands of the Lesser Antilles during the first half of the eighteenth century permitted some people to live beyond imperial oversight, while its promotion by colonial officials in the second half of the eighteenth century went hand in hand with greater surveillance, oppression, and suffering.

The Creole Archipelago argues for understanding Antillean political upheaval and rebellion during the Age of Revolutions as motivated by long-simmering but hyperlocal causes rather than dictated by revolutionary movements imported from France or Saint-Domingue. On islands ceded to the British in 1763, French Catholic planters played significant roles in local politics. Fearing exodus, depopulation, and economic ruin, British officials initially offered resident planters numerous privileges to remain. As was also the case in British Quebec, Catholics on Grenada, Dominica, and St. Vincent were not required to disavow the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. However, after local communities proved alarmingly receptive to French occupation during the American Revolutionary War, British planters became increasingly paranoid of long-resident French-speaking neighbors as a traitorous fifth column. On Grenada, Catholic property holders were abruptly prevented from holding elected office. Simultaneously, free people of color faced growing racial and religious restrictions, enslaved people sought freedom, and Kalinago leaders struggled against British trespasses. The Creole Archipelago examines the Second Carib War and Fedon's Rebellion in the 1790s as responses to intensifying local pressures and argues that such movements "seem less like revolutions and more like attempts to preserve longstanding realities increasingly at risk of being erased by encroaching colonial regimes" (p. 232). The Creole Archipelago portrays its island societies as enduring and persistent as they were tossed between nominal French and British control over many decades. However, in the aftermath of island resistance at the end of the eighteenth century, British officials violently suppressed potential sources of rebellion, physically expelled the Kalinago people, and finally eradicated the cultural conditions that had enabled a Creole archipelago to exist.

The Creole Archipelago argues for continuities rather than ruptures, lumping rather than splitting. While it claims the expanse of the Lesser Antilles "from Guadeloupe in the north to Grenada in the south," its focus remains on the smaller islands of that chain, which were either politically neutral or controlled by the Kalinago for several decades longer than the larger islands (p. 6). Grenada appears in the index sixty times; Guadeloupe appears twenty-seven times. This emphasis dovetails with the book's focus on extra-imperial spaces. Martinique and Guadeloupe were more tightly claimed and managed by imperial administrators, and so they were the oppressive islands from which people fled into watery borderlands. This view of the Caribbean, in which Martinique and Guadeloupe feature infrequently, renders the book's spatial claims about the extent of the Creole Archipelago somewhat geographically selective.

By studying the peripheries of empires in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, The Creole Archipelago joins recent scholarship by Linda M. Rupert, Elena A. Schneider, Jesse Cromwell, and Ernesto Bassi. The book's use of British and French archives will prove invigorating to scholars searching for complementary Atlantic histories captured in the margins of Spanish, Portuguese, or Dutch archives. For scholars working on other imperial regions, the book itself calls for more work to link the histories of British empires across the Caribbean and India. Finally, the book's account of eighteenth-century debates over Kalinago indigeneity and authenticity will resonate with anyone studying or participating in current Indigenous Caribbean movements.

[Citation: Lauren MacDonald. Review of Murphy, Tessa. The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean. H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews. August, 2022. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes.]

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Book Review

Jennifer L. Morgan. Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021. 312 pp. (Paperback). ISBN 978-1-4780-1414-0.

H-Net Book Review, published by H-Early-America, https://networks.h-net.org/h-early-america (July, 2022).

Reviewed for H-Early-America by Allison Madar (The Webb Schools).

In Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic, Jennifer L. Morgan examines the relationship between "economy, ideology, and kinship" and seeks to uncover "the explicit link between human commodification and the rise of market economies" (pp. 10, 11). Her study centers enslaved women, historical actors whose lived experiences, due to both the violence of the archive and the reliance of historians on quantifiable data, are often difficult to uncover. Moreover, Morgan seeks to elucidate "the role of kinship in authorizing hereditary racial slavery and in shaping the development of slavery as a financial and commercial instrument" during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (p. 26).

Morgan takes an interdisciplinary approach in her study, using the scholarly approaches of both social history and Black feminist theory. In so doing, she puts Reckoning with Slavery in conversation with the work of such scholars as Stephanie Smallwood, Herman Bennett, Alys Weinbaum, and Saidiya Hartman. Most notably, though, Morgan "write[s] in the tradition of Hortense Spillers and Cedric Robinson" (p. 10). Throughout, she engages with Spillers's concept of the reproduction of kinlessness forced upon enslaved women and builds on the insights of Robinson in Black Marxism (1983) and the relationship between racism and capitalism. More specifically, she "engage[s] Robinson in tandem with the concept of reproduction" to assert the centrality of the reproductive labor of enslaved women in the simultaneous emergence of slavery and capitalism in the early modern Atlantic world (p. 16).

Dividing her work into two parts, Morgan seeks to answer a number of questions. Key among them -- and central to the first half of the book -- is: "In the face of the commodification of human beings, what did New World kinship come to mean?" (p. 24). To answer this question, she first considers the sex ratios of slave ships and the relatively small number of ships that actually logged this information before moving on to an indepth discussion of numeracy in chapters 2 and 3. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Morgan argues, saw the emergence of "a relatively new set of ideas concerning trade, value, population, and commodification." All of these ideas, she continues, "might qualify as forms of numeracy" (p. 6). In chapter 2, Morgan traces the connection between Europeans' justification for slavery (and the retention of "their moral core") and numeracy, and in chapter 3 she turns to the western coast of Africa to explore numeracy in concert with the experience of commodification by African men and women (p. 24).

In the second part of the book, Morgan delves into the experiences of women, from their capture, to transport, to sale. Chapter 6 delves into acts of resistance employed by enslaved women "to disrupt their commodification" (p. 26). It is in these chapters that Morgan emphasizes the violence and inhumanity of the institution of slavery and the ways enslaved women came "to understand the role of kinship at the heart of early modern slavery and ... racial capitalism" (p. 25). Morgan's task here -- or in the first half of the book -- was not an easy one, but she interrogates extant sources for both what is there and what is absent.

At times, she introduces sources familiar to scholars of slavery and the early modern Atlantic world and reads them through a new lens. For example, in a section titled "Recording Middle Passages" in chapter 4, she takes the well-known image of the Brookes and, despite the image's original purpose as a piece of antislavery literature, uses the image to reinforce her assertions regarding the process of commodification and enslavers' attempts to ensure that enslaved laborers were without kin.

Reckoning with Slavery is a valuable addition to the studies of enslaved women, slavery, slavery and capitalism, and the violence of the archive. It is a wonderful example of the importance of centering the lives and experiences of enslaved women and their own understanding of the connections between kinship, slavery, and capitalism. Morgan clearly illustrates that "kinship is antithetically tethered to the processes of commodification and capitalism set in motion in the early modern period" (p. 248). In addition, Morgan demonstrates the value of interdisciplinary work and the necessity to think of slavery and capitalism not as opposing forces but as parts of the same whole.

[Citation: Allison Madar. Review of Morgan, Jennifer L. Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic. H-Early-America, H-Net Reviews. July, 2022. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes.]

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